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The staff of Jacobin Magazine, pretty clearly. Marx, Marxists, people who adhere to bespoke ideological varietals of Marxism hybridized with other stuff. Egalitarians generally, who look down on slave-owning white supremacist founders. If we expand the question to "consider the Jacobins equally admirable as the Founding Fathers", we get probably some number of the Founding Fathers themselves.
Would you consider Mark Twain to be an advocate of Enlightenment thought? Did you read his quote I provided above? Likewise Duranty, and by extension all his colleagues.
For users here, I don't know. That's why I ask. I think it'd be a solid majority of politically-aware redditors, though. I have been repeatedly told by other long-time commenters here that it's understandable to give a pass not only to the French Revolution but the Bolsheviks, because they had "good intentions".
The whole point of the French vs American revolution comparison is that the two revolutions were very different in character, and therefore we ought to be able to say that one was a more central example of the Enlightenment than the other. If you think the American Revolution is the central one and the French is the outlier, then you need to explain why so many experts and elites seem to think the opposite. If you think the French revolution is the more central example, you need to explain why people think that tyranny and slaughter are disqualifiers for placement within the Enlightenment set.
The whole point is that people will claim that the Enlightenment is about liberty and freedom and human flourishing and rule of law, and then will turn right around and argue that ideological movements that claimed to be part of the Enlightenment and were recognized by others as being part of the Enlightenment trampled all these things in horrifying ways, and their crimes were systematically ignored by the Enlightenment's apparent champions. This isn't a subtle pattern.
I like my odds.
Others in this thread are defending the Enlightenment based on the massive increase in wealth and general luxury resulting from the scientific and industrial revolutions. Whether or not Enlightenment ideology actually was responsible for that ludicrous increase in wealth, the increase itself was very real; I'd point to the quote about west Texans supporting FDR because he brought them electricity. That sort of massive increase in standard of living buys a movement a lot of loyalty, and claiming credit for multiple generations of such improvements is how Enlightenment ideology cemented its intellectual hegemony.
Those increases haven't been happening for some time. The last plausible candidate was the Internet, and a decade and change ago I would have argued that it was straightforwardly a wonder of the world. Now I've seen too many downsides, and it seems to me that so have a lot of other people. Scarcity of various sorts is setting in. Increasingly, technology is no longer a source of wonder and delight, but of fear and angst. For previous generations, tech made life glorious; for the current one, it increasingly makes us wretched. And crucially, this stagnation has already been enough to burn down the large majority of Enlightenment ideology's social capital. Trust in The Science, Academia, the Press, trust in experts and elites, trust in social systems, in leadership, all of those have absolutely cratered over the last decade. The Culture War has escaped containment and now crushes all before it. If science and tech could have kept the streak going, probably Enlightenment ideology could have kept policy starvation to a minimum and stayed on top. But they didn't, and so here we are.
Maybe AI will change that, and cause another explosion of prosperity and wonder. And if so, that's wonderful; I've long argued that a resumption of the tech whalefall would be one of the clearest and most likely positive solutions to the Culture War, and in that eventuality, none of this will matter because we will be too busy being fat and happy to bother with it. But if that doesn't happen, if AI or some other pivotal technology doesn't deliver a fair impression of an actual singularity, then the present trends are likely to continue, and the tottering structures above us come right on down, I think.
I don't remember this one. Could you link or elaborate?
"Was the Enlightenment a good idea?"
I am sorry, but all of this seems to me as lots of crying over spilt milk. The Enlightenment bad. What is then good?
The Enlightenment is done deal, there is no going back. Even if you think that humanity peaked in 1700, that palace of Versailles of Louis XIV was the pinnacle of perfection, you are not bringing it back.
The whole world runs on Enlightenment now. Everyone wears Western suits or military uniforms, everyone pays lip service to the high ideas, everyone from Kim and Putin to ordinary African strong man claims to be democratically elected leader serving the people.
Multiparty democracy, one party rule, military dictatorship - all are creations of the Enlightenment.
As they say, TINA. Where are any non-enlightened models in today's world?
Iran? There are elections, parliament and the whole shebang.
Gulf oil states? Areas controlled by Al Qaeda or ISIS? Less than appealing alternatives.
Remember, the Enlightenment won not because of beauty of its ideas, it won because Enlightened armies and fleets trashed all of their opposition.
When Yemen starts sinking US carrier groups, not once in freak accident but repeatedly and consistently, when new revolutionary discoveries and technologies start arriving from ISIS controlled zones in Africa, then we can talk.
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